‘New’ Men and Pedagogies of Self in the Indian Manosphere

The ‘manosphere’ is a “loosely connected group of anti-feminist Internet communities” (Van Valkenburgh, 2021, p. 84) across a range of online fora and spaces. A substantial body of feminist media scholarship provides a thorough account of manosphere logics, while pointing to a broader trend of masculine anxieties over “men’s position in the social hierarchy as a result of feminism” (Ging, 2019, p. 653). Recently, attention has shifted towards understanding the manosphere’s influence on boys’ and men’s attitudes and practices in wider social settings, including schools (Wescott and Roberts, 2024; Zhao et al., 2024). Responding to the current limited focus on Western and English-speaking contexts, this paper aims to understand the political project that Bannerji (2006) describes as “making India Hindu and male”. Popularised by noted journalist Ravish Kumar, the phrase ‘Whatsapp University’ emphasises the all-pervasive educational role of social media in contemporary India. Using critical discourse analysis, here we examine content produced by three popular YouTubers from the ‘Indian manosphere’ (Bagchi, 2024). We argue that these anti-feminist manfluencers use a range of “pedagogies of self” (Hickey and Austin 2007) to educate a ‘new’ Indian man (Philips 2022) wedded simultaneously to the logics of neoliberal modernity, Hindu supremacy (Hindutwa), and authoritarianism to produce both physical and epistemic violence against women and minorities.